Read This Instead…

Is there something you love doing but haven’t been able to do in a while because you’re too tied up in your business? You’re too overwhelmed with all of the tedious tasks that your business requires?

Today, we’ll talk about how you can create leverage in your business so you can have more freedom to do the things you love. 

If you’re new here, I’m Denisse Marie. I’m a Marketing and Growth Strategist and I help amazing women who own professional service businesses integrate the right resources and systems so that they can enjoy profit, productivity, and freedom. 

I started going to hot yoga recently. I used to go almost every day but it’s been quite a while since I just stopped going. And I got really thrown off of my routine because I got really wrapped up in work. A lot of my health priorities just went out the window — I wasn’t really exercising or eating the way I wanted anymore. And then it got really hard to get back into it because I created this habit of always working. 

But I just started going again, so I’m super excited. And I just love it. It’s my time for self-care, distressing, and for detoxing. Then I get back to work or to being with my daughters feeling rejuvenated. And of course after a shower because with hot yoga, you’re just drenched in sweat. 

If you’ve never tried it, I highly recommend it. One of the reasons I love it is because you’re using your biggest organ, your skin, to detox. I have a five-day routine that includes three days of hot power yoga, which is hardcore. Then I do a Hatha Vinyasa combo class, and then I finished with a yin yoga class that helps me stretch out my muscles and release tension. So it feels amazing. Warning  — it is hard. When I did years ago for the first time, I got sick and had to walk out. But once you continue, your body begins to adjust. 

Since I started going again, I started thinking about the question that I have for you today, which is:  What’s something that you love and you haven’t done in a while? As women, as business owners, we can get caught up in our day-to-day, working in our businesses, running a household — all kinds of things. And especially when our businesses don’t have the right processes or systems that work for us, we can start to feel really overwhelmed and burned out.

We can get caught up in the really manual and tedious types of tasks and processes, and not have the time to do what we want to do. And at whatever time of the day, we want to do it, right? What if you just want to walk out at two o’clock in the afternoon to go to your yoga class? Why does it have to be after work like a regular nine to five job? You want the freedom to do the things you love when you want to do them. 

Pause and Reflect…

So some reflection questions for you to consider today are:

1. Are you feeling like you’re constantly putting in all this effort in your business, you’re working on your business all the time, and you’re still not seeing the reward from it that you want to see? The profit you want to see? 

2. If you haven’t been able to scale, what processes tasks, systems, or lack of systems are keeping you tied up, overwhelmed, and preventing you from the things that you want to do, or even just taking that role of being just the visionary in your business? 

If any of these questions are resonating with you, feel free to reflect on these questions, take a step back to think about what’s happening in your business, and write in your journal (I have a journal specifically for my business thoughts, reflections, ideas, and to-dos). 

What I want to share today is about creating leverage. Creating leverage is about using something to its maximum advantage. It’s taking advantage of resources available to you like technology or software. 

When you have leverage in specific areas of your business, you can be more productive, efficient, and profitable.

You can have more time for the things that you love. 

You can stop being the bottleneck in your business. 

You can stop living in overwhelm, and stress, or even firefighter mode, which is more common than you think. 

How to Create Leverage In Your Business

So let’s talk about exactly HOW to create leverage in your business. The top four ways to create leverage are:

1. Systems
2. Time
3. Your Team
4. Automation

Systems

Systems are about creating structure and organization in your business with documented processes. When you have documented processes in place, it’s easier to delegate. It doesn’t require your daily involvement. Everything can run smoothly when there’s a process that the right person on your team can follow. For example, a process could be an onboarding process for hiring, or if you host a podcast, it could be the steps taken by you or your team before, during, and after a podcast episode. It can even simple things like invoicing your clients. 

I’ve worked with companies that document processes and their team, they follow them for a while. But then little by little as things come up or things get a little chaotic, the business owner is not paying attention, they start to fall through, and then all of a sudden, that process is just forgotten. And there are many reasons why this happens and there are ways to prevent them. 

We’ll dive deeper into that in another video. For now, keep in mind that there are other aspects of the business that need attention so that the systems are actually followed through. 

Time

Time is the ultimate resource. Leveraging your time is about focusing on what matters most while eliminating, delegating, outsourcing (or automating!) less important activities. 

I worked with a business owner who had a team and not just any team — her team was made up of competent directors and managerial-level employees. And yet, she was in the habit of reviewing everything and anything that was produced before it was executed or shared. With employees at this level, is that really something that she should be using her time on? Is it an efficient use of her time to be reviewing every single thing?

It essentially created a bottleneck in the company and it prevented the business from moving forward faster, employees feeling frustrated, and the owner feeling like she had little bandwidth all the time. It’s important to cultivate a culture of trust and to allow ourselves as business owners to let go and allow our team to take ownership and be held accountable instead.

Your Team

Leveraging a team is about hiring, delegating, or outsourcing to great people. They’re out there — you can find the perfect people that are just right for your business. To find them could mean creating and executing a strategic hiring process that allows you to find and hire the best people. It means investing in them so that there is a high level of trust and you can focus on being the visionary that you are. 

Automation

Make automation part of your team. That’s one of my favorite ways to save time, especially if a team is not possible for you yet because you’re a solopreneur or maybe you have one assistant and can’t afford to hire more employees. There are many apps that make it easy to automate parts of your business (and they are affordable too). Once you have documented systems, review them to identify processes you can automate to increase operational efficiency, improve customer service, decrease expenses, and streamline your business giving you more opportunities for scaling and profit.

Some examples of what you can automate are your customer onboarding process, your sales process and follow-up, and many marketing tasks, like an email sequence after someone signs up for a free offering. 

To learn more about creating leverage in your business, sign up for a free mini-workshop on the four growth systems you can leverage to increase profit, scale your business and gain more time all on autopilot. It’s completely free. 

Let me know in the comments… 

What do you think about creating leverage in your business?

If you are already leveraging one or two of these, how can you optimize them?

I’d love to hear from you! 

And I encourage you to subscribe to my channel! I share new videos every week with marketing strategies, tactics, and ways that you can find more freedom, find more profit, and find more productivity in your business. 

Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll see you soon!